TUBIGGGGG!!!!

BooI grew up in a neighborhood in Paco, Manila where the occasional screams for water were often heard. TUBIGGGGG!!!! Someone was most likely taking a shower, shampooed and soaped him/herself and all of a sudden, the water pressure is gone. I learned to take a bath using a tabo and a pail of water. That is the fail proof way of making sure you don’t have to scream for water.

We can do without electricity but not without water.  When we bought our house in White Plains, Quezon City in 1983, we had to install a storage tank because we only got water in the wee hours after midnight. We needed a pump connected to the tank to bring water up the second floor in the daytime. If the tank fails to fill up overnight, we have problems taking a bath, washing the dishes, or doing the laundry. MWSS was legendarily inefficient and the water rate I recall was in the neighborhood of over P9 per cubic meter.

I recall then Prime Minister Cesar Virata making an observation that our problem is we spend a bundle to purify the water we flow into our pipes to drinking quality, only to have most of that water used for flushing toilets and watering lawns.

It is so economically inefficient. What’s more, we were losing about half of all that purified water in our American-era water distribution pipes that leak 24/7.

Fast forward to today or about 40 years later, our population has grown exponentially but we are still dependent on Angat Dam for over 95 percent of our water needs in NCR.

Water rates have gone down and water pressure is strong enough to get water in our faucets 24/7 after privatization of the distribution system.

The only new development today is the news that a Department of Water will soon be created. That’s it. Create a new bureaucracy and throw some money to our problem and hope a solution emerges by some magic.

Looking back from the time they took over water distribution in one part of NCR, the spokesman of Manila Water recalled to ABS-CBN News that the population they are serving has more than doubled but the water source remains constant.

It is the same story that plagues our road traffic problems…the number of vehicles increase by 500,000 each year but the road space remains almost the same.

Government failure to deliver is at the root of our problems.

But for water, climate change and population growth are clearly threatening water supplies and our lives. Look at all the vertical expansion in condominiums, tall office buildings and expansive malls. So, where are we going to get the water required by everyone?

Unless something miraculously drastic happens soon, we will all be screaming TUBIGGGG!!!

Cape Town, South Africa almost went dry in 2018. Last week, a Washington Post headline read: Mexico City’s water ‘Day Zero’ may come even for the wealthiest residents. “The metropolitan area of 22 million gets about a quarter of its water from a system that is running dry,” WaPo reports.

“Some say it could be unable to provide water by June 26.”

Are we going to get to the point Mexico City is in now? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes. Our officials and our bureaucracy are champion procrastinators. They wait for the last moment and then declare a state of emergency seemingly in panic. But not to be fooled. They use a crisis situation as an opportunity to make money. No COA audits! Remember Pharmally?

There is a fantastic in-depth report on our current water crisis situation done by the investigative team at ABS-CBN News.

Those who want to get a good perspective of where we are now, here is the link: https://news.abs-cbn.com/specials/mind-the-tap

For now, I just want to emphasize one of the conclusions of the abs-cbn news report:

“Taking into account the delays in establishing new water sources amid Metro Manila’s growing demand, water conservation becomes essential.”

As we did with energy in the early 80s, we need to have a widespread public awareness campaign about practical water conservation steps.

“Imagine using four to seven liters of clean water, which could have been saved for drinking, to flush the toilet in one go.

According to the Handbook of Water Use and Conservation, a person uses 70 liters of water daily for flushing when using a toilet without efficient fixtures. This amount could have covered a person’s drinking water requirement for 23 days.”

Greywater recycling and rainwater harvesting are seen as ways to lessen demand for raw water coming from Angat Dam. Grey water is relatively clean waste water from baths, sinks, washing machines that had gone through a sewage treatment plant and cleaned almost to drinkable level and only requires additional chemicals and ultraviolet exposure to be pure enough to drink.

ABS-CBN News reports that “In 2022, Maynilad Water launched its New Water project, which recycles used water discharged from the concessionaire’s Paranaque Water Reclamation Facility. The project aims to produce 10 million liters of water daily, to be treated and blended with water from its La Mesa Treatment plant, for distribution as potable water to customers in Barangay San Isidro and San Dionisio in Parañaque City.”

Another example is Singapore’s NEWater, a high-grade recycled water produced from treated used water that is further purified using advanced membrane technologies and ultra-violet disinfection, making it ultra-clean and safe to drink. NEWater was first introduced in 2003 following a two-year comprehensive study.

Manila is going to be among a handful of cities in the world facing the biggest water scarcity crisis by 2050, according to a recent study published in Nature. Water scarcity is everyone’s concern as climate change deepens. We have to learn to use water wisely because it is a life and death issue.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco